How one site focuses on mobile first

Daniel Popper,
American Journalism Review,
May 2015
Being "mobile first" means putting a premium on serving the phone and tablet user fast-loading pages and content appropriate for the form and use case. It also means embracing new technologies, just as users do, as opportunities to extend the storytelling form.

This case study on the local startup news site Billy Penn looks into the reasons and ways the site’s founder, Jim Brady, focuses on his mobile audience. He discusses how “the whole site was designed for a phone or a tablet, and how it looks on the web is kind of secondary.”

He added that focusing on mobile means focusing on different metrics. “You have to focus on load time. You have to focus on ad experience.” He describes mobile users as task-oriented and impatient. “You don’t want to build something that’s going to be ornate and take 15 seconds to load,” Brady says. Instead, make the storytelling form entertaining, relatively straightforward, and fast to load.